Still image compression is one of the most common applications in storing and transfer of pictures, particularly for mobile devices such as cameras, scanners, handsets and other portable devices such as PDAs (Portable Personal Assistant).
The resolution of pictures taken by modern devices have been growing dramatically and the compression of such large resolution still images (e.g. between 1.2 to 12+ Mega Pixels) demands huge computational and memory resources. These limitations call for an efficient compression scheme that will reduce storage while preserving a satisfactory quality for its intended use.
The still and video cameras, like many handheld devices and cellular handsets, capture high resolution images. Typically these devices use the JPEG method for compression of the images. The JPEG format is limited in its compression ratio so that in order to store high quality and/or high resolution pictures an unacceptable size is needed, (see for example, http://white.stanford.edu/˜brian/psy221/reader/Wallace.JPEG.pdf, http://www.jpeg.org, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference).